Zadie Smith - NW

“This all needs redoing.”

“Yes. But you just can’t find the help these days. Once upon a time you’d get a lovely young film crew turning up, they’d pay you two thousand pounds a week, lay a deck, paint it, fuck you passionately and tell you they loved you — but that kind of service is a thing of the past, I’m afraid.”

Felix put his head in his hands.

“Annie, man. You give me jokes, for real.”

Annie smiled sadly: “I’m glad I still give you something, at least…” She righted an upturned deckchair. “Looks a bit rough at the moment, I know… But I’ve been entertaining — I had one of my big nights, last Friday, such a nice time, you should have been here. I did send a text. You contrive not to see my texts. Lovely crowd, the sweetest people. Hot as Ibiza up here.”

She made it sound like a society party, filled with the great and good. Felix picked up an empty bottle of Strongbow cider that had been repurposed into a bong.

“You need to stop letting people take advantage.”

Annie snorted: “What nonsense!” She sat wide legged on the little bridge of bricks between the chimney stacks. “That’s what people are for. They take advantage of each other. What else are they for?”

“They’re only hanging round you because you’ve got something they want. Soho liggers. Just want somewhere to crash. And if there’s free shit — bonus.”

“Good. That’s what I’ve got. Why shouldn’t people take advantage of me if what I have is useful to them?” She crossed one leg over the other like a teacher reaching the substance of her lecture. “It happens that in this matter of property and drugs I am strong and they are weak. In other matters it’s the other way round. The weak should take advantage of the strong, don’t you think? Better that than the other way round. I want my friends to take advantage. I want them to feed off me. I want them drinking my blood. Why not? They’re my friends. What else am I to do in this place? Raise a family?”

That line of conversation Felix knew to be a trap. He swerved to avoid it.

“I’m saying they ain’t your friends. They’re users.”

Annie fixed him with a look over her shades: “You sound very sure. Are you speaking from personal experience?”

“Why you trying to mix up my words?” He was easily flustered and it mistranslated as anger. People thought he was on the verge of hitting someone when he was only nervous, or slightly annoyed. Annie lifted a shaky finger into the air.

“Don’t raise your voice at me, Felix. I hope you haven’t come round here for a fight because I’m feeling really quite delicate.”

Felix groaned and sat next to her on the bridge of bricks. He put his hand softly on her knee, meaning it like a father or friend, but she grabbed it and held it tightly in her own.

“Can you see? Over there? Flag’s up. Somebody’s home. Best view in town.”

“Annie—”

“My mother was presented at the palace, you know. And my grandmother.”

“Is it.”

“Yes, Felix, it is. Surely I’ve told you that before.”

“Yeah, you have, as it goes.”

He worked his hand free and stood up again.

“They flee from me that sometime did me seek,” said Annie quietly, removed her robe and lay naked in the sun. “There’s some vodka in the freezer.”

“I told you I don’t drink no more.”

“ Still? ”

“I told you. That’s why I ain’t been round. Not just that, other reasons, too. I’m clean. You should think about it yourself.”

“But darling, I am clean. Two years clean.”

“Cept the coke, weed, drink, pills…”

“I said I’m clean, not a bloody Mormon!”

“I’m talking about doing it properly.”

Annie got up on her elbows and pushed her shades into her hair: “And spend every day listening to people bang on about the time they found themselves in a bin covered with vomit? And pretend that every good time I’ve ever had in my life was some kind of extended adolescent delusion?” She lay back down and replaced the shades. “No thank you. Could you fetch me a vodka please? With lemon, if you can find it.”

Diagonally across the street from them, on another roof terrace, a severely dressed Japanese woman — narrow black trousers and black V-neck — dropped a tray she was carrying. A glass smashed and one plate of food went flying; the other she somehow managed to hold on to. She had been heading for a small wrought-iron table at which sat a lanky Frenchman, in parodic red braces with his jeans rolled up to the calf. Now he jumped up. At the same moment a little girl ran out, looked at this domestic tragedy and put her hand over her mouth. They were all three familiar to Felix; he’d seen them many times over the years. First her alone; then he moved in. Then the baby turned up, who looked now to be four or five years old. Where had the time gone? Quite often, in good weather, he had watched the woman take pictures of her family on a proper camera set atop a tripod base.

“Oops,” said Annie, “trouble in paradise.”

“Annie, listen: remember that girl I was telling you about. The serious one.”

“I’m afraid it really does serve them right. They couldn’t just eat in their flat. That would be too much of a hardship. Instead they have to bring up each piece of individually miso-stained balsamic glaze cod fillet up on a tray, so they can eat them on the sodding terrace, all the time no doubt saying to themselves: how lucky we are to be eating on the terrace! Why, we could be in Tuscany! Have you tried these, darling? They’re tempura zucchini flowers. Japanese-Italian fusion! My own invention. Shall I photograph it? We can put it on our blog. ”

“Annie.”

“Our blog called Jules et Kim .”

“Me and that girl. Grace. It’s serious. I’m not going to be coming round here no more.”

Annie held a hand up in the air and seemed to examine her nails, though each one was lower than the finger’s tip, with skin torn from either side and old blood-tracks all round the cuticles. “I see. Didn’t she have another lover, too?”

“That’s done with.”

“I see,” said Annie again, rolled onto her stomach and kicked her feet with their extraordinary arches into the air. “Age?”

Felix couldn’t help but smile: “Twenty-four, coming up, I think. In November. But it ain’t even about that.”

“And still no vodka.”

Felix sighed and started walking back to the trapdoor.

“I shall think of the other lover!” he heard Annie call after him as he descended. “I shall pity him! It’s so important that we pity each other!”

Marlon. It was done with finally on a Sunday in February while Felix sat on Grace’s stairwell, rolling a fag and shivering, peeking through the net curtain. The man had watched the other man as he trudged through the flat, collecting a bike lock, some ugly clothes, a music dock for an iPod, a pair of hair clippers. He was heavy, Marlon, not fat exactly, but soft and ungainly. He was a long time in the bathroom, re-emerging with several jars of wax and tubes of cream, at least one of which was Felix’s — but Felix had won the woman and considered he could live without his Dax. After Marlon was done retrieving his things, Felix watched him as he took Grace’s hands in his own like a man about to perform a religious ritual and said, “I’m thankful for the time we spent together.” Poor Marlon. He really didn’t have a fucking clue. He even turned up a few times after that — with mix-tapes of soca music, and handwritten notes, and tears. None of which helped his case. In the end, all the things Grace claimed to like about Marlon — that he was not a “playa,” that he was gentle and awkward and not interested in money — were all the reasons she left him. Being so gentle, it was a while before he got the message. Finally he had taken his “I’m-a-male-nurse-I-find-hip-hop-too-negative-I-can-cook-curried-goat-I-want-to-move-to-Nigeria” routine back to South London where, in Felix’s opinion, it belonged.